St. Charles Satellite Center students work on the St. Charles Museum and Historical Association's new virtual museum.

“Creating the online museum for the association was a huge project and a wonderful experience,” said Lasca Anderson, the center’s administrator. “The project allowed the team members to learn to work together and with an outside client. An added bonus was to learn local history and give back to the community. This project was a win-win situation for all involved.”

At the end of 2011, the interactive media class held a launch of the three-month project, designed to bring St. Charles Parish’s history to life through the association’s vision of an online museum.

The museum will eventually house videos, pictures, information, stories and other information for residents to peruse at their leisure, Anderson said.

The launch marked the end of the first phase of the project, which was building the structure and organizing the existing content into categories for navigation. Although there is much information that was gathered from the book “St. Charles Parish Louisiana: A Pictorial History,” more of the parish’s history is still yet to be told, and this will be the focus of the next phase of the project.

Thousands of copies of “St. Charles Parish Louisiana: A Pictorial History” have been sold in the parish, and the association recently received its third edition that will be distributed for sale in shops in the New Orleans Metropolitan and River Region areas. Now the association hopes to be on the cutting edge with a website and virtual museum sharing parish history through the Internet, said association member Joan Becnel.

Instructor Brian Gough, interactive media facilitator at the satellite center, said students are enthusiastic and look forward to moving ahead with the project.

The project is financed by the Shell and Motiva Cultural Fund.

Becnel, a member of the association and one of the authors of the book, said the interactive media class is doing an outstanding job.

“The students and their teacher (Brian Gough) are deserving of so much credit for their creativity and development of the association’s new website,” Becnel said. “It’s just awesome that they agreed to tackle such a large first-time project.”

The association also has hired a webmaster who will work with the students.